Teaching statistics for the future: the MOOC revolution and beyond

Brian Caffo, PhD
09/20/2014

Outline of the talk

  1. Who am I?
  2. A brief taxonomy and history of online educational models
  3. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
  4. JHU Biostat involvement in Coursera
  5. Novel moving target directions of the field of statistics
  6. Data Science Specialization
  7. swirl

Slides

  • HTML5 using Rstudio presenter
  • Appear on github at (https://github.com/bcaffo/MOOCtalk) fork if you'd like
  • Jointly written with my collaborators Jeff Leek and Roger Peng
  • CC licensed by-nc-sa

Core team

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Plus generous contributions from the

My day job(s)

Connectomics

resting state fMRI

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Educational systems

  • Online / in person / blended
  • Active/participatory/interactive learning
  • Scalable / non-scalable
  • Low cost / high cost / freemium
  • Student paced / teacher paced
  • Open / restricted access
  • Flipped / lecture style / blended
  • Open / closed source content
  • Instructor interaction
  • Credentialing
  • Funding model

Massive Open Online Courses

Primary characteristics are open access, low cost, scalable, online

(every letter is negotiable, from Wikipedia citing Mathieu Plorde)

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Most visible MOOC instruction sites

Coursera platform, videos

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Example videos (on YouTube)

Important number: production time per hour of video time

Equipment

Coursera platform, quizzes

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Coursera platform, peer grading

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Coursera platform, forums

Main source for student interaction

(Forums can be brutal)

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Johns Hopkins Biostat Coursera classes

Original three

  • Brian Caffo, Roger Peng, Jeff Leek
  • Run 09/2012, 09/2012, 01/2013
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End of course enrollments

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